This Itch of Writing

Worth doing badly

One of the stranger things about the photography course I did recently is that we were working in landscapes that our tutors know intimately, and have been photographing for years. That's a huge advantage to us: with only two days, they could take us to places that they knew would prove fruitful to us amateurs in the time available, and then when the weather changed and the light with it, they could turn round and take us somewhere else.

But it did mean that I was always aware that whatever elements I was trying to make into a photograph, they'd seen and known and made a better photograph with already. So what? We weren't trying to be Ansel Adams or Joe Cornish (which was just as well), but trying to learn in the only way you can learn: by doing, and looking, and doing again. If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly, as my schoolmaster grandfather used to say. So, though I know - because I've seen them - that much better photographs exist of this rock and this view - I'm posting it anyway. It may be badly, but I did it, and on the far side of having done it, my eyes and hands and mind know a few things, just a little, that they didn't before. No one reading this blog needs to be reminded that I am, of course, also talking about writing.

It could be worse

Nobody ever said that writing novels was easy. It takes too long, for a start, and it's bad for your health. It's lonely, and badly paid, and while a slight kink in the psyche is probably what made you a writer in the first place, you also have to be slightly nuts to persevere to the point where you can earn your living by writing-related work. But having spent the beginning of the week in the company of professional landscape photographers, courtesy of the Peak District Photography Centre, I'm beginning to think I'll have to stop moaning.

It's all in a dawn's work for Karen, Fran, Mike or Alex to get up at four, climb a fell in the dark (did you remember your head-torch, as well as making the right decision about which bits of kit were worth lugging up several hundred feet with you?) and sit there for an hour to catch sunrise on a distant peak. The forecast was good, but though forecasters can tell you that clear weather's coming, they can't always tell you just when. Not to within an hour either way of sunrise, anyway. Still, on the way down you see, in the flat, grey, damp light that's trickling through the clouds, how the celandines are glowing in a way that the sun would dim. An hour ago you were shivering on a wind-torn ridge; now you're lying flat on your front in the mud. They're like gold among the crumpled brown of last year's leaves. Only later do you start to think which magazine, if any, might buy the shot. If they do, perhaps you can buy a camp stove for the van. That would make sitting out a rainstorm in a car park, waiting for that elusive shaft of sunlight, rather more comfortable. Dawn's not the only light that picks out forms and colours, so once the hard, overhead light of the middle of the day has passed, you start all over again, and only get home after dark.

A landscape photographer might return over and over again for weeks to a set of rocks or a mountain stream, hoping for the right light on it to coincide with the right light on the distant valley, and then the season changes, the leaves come out, or fall, and the chance has gone till next year. A sudden frost will fringe winter trees with diamonds and you have drop everything to get there; a sudden flood of rain when you're on your way to the supermarket might flood the muddy ruts of an industrial site, so they reflect brick chimneys and abandoned towers as shimmering ghosts of their old strength. Use your craft to get it right in the camera - light, colour, structure, composition, focal length, aperture, shutter speed, depth of field, white balance, ISO, exposure compensation and sharpness (those winds...) - and you won't have to spend too much time indoors at the computer tomorrow. Because you wouldn't do it if you didn't want to live outside: usually too cold or too hot or rain-soaked or sun-burnt, while every day  - every year - is chancy, contingent, unstable. You're always planning for a goal, but must always be willing to change your plans, or abandon them altogether, when something you see sends that little electric charge across your skin. It's that prickling skin that tells you that here, suddenly, your craft can make art.

So I'm going to stop complaining. But I'm also going to recognise that, apart from the sun-burn, the contingency is something I do know from writing. It might seem that, unlike photography, writing novels could be planned down to the last inch. We don't depend on the state of the sun or our batteries: we don't even have people peering over our shoulders and asking what we're doing. But actually, even at our desks, we don't know where we're going either: we plan the next turn, but we don't know what's beyond it. When we get there, it might be quite different, and need quite different writing. Here's our craft as writers: that we plan for what we hope we can do, but when everything changes it's our craft that can make the unexpected into art.

Not reading -

- to follow on from Not writing

   

though while I was away a bit of Talking about The Mathematics of Love, A Secret Alchemy, and writing in general was posted on Vulpes Libris

Not writing

Like many writers, I spent much of my childhood telling myself - sotto voce if no one was around, or in my head if I might be overheard - the story of what I was doing as I did it. It wasn't a commentary, exactly, at least not in the sense of commenting on my actions as someone else would: it was more that putting my life into words brought my existence into focus as nothing else did. I guess in a family which rated books and words and talking beyond almost anything else that ordinary life contains, it was hardly suprising.

On the MPhil in Writing at Glamorgan, four times a year, all the students and tutors travel down to spend a Friday and Saturday workshopping their work. Starting from the hours on the train, or in the motorway service station, when you read and mark up the thick booklet of everyone's writing, through the readings, workshops, tutorials and hours in the pub, you're living, breathing and thinking in words. On the Sunday, I used to get up early to drive up into the Brecon Beacons, clamber onto a horse, and spend a day riding. It was the perfect antidote, first of all because even if the riding isn't hard it uses a darn sight more muscles than writing does. Second, the Beacons are one of the most beautiful places in the whole of Britain and on a horse you're higher up and can go further than you can on foot. But there was more to it than that. I'm not a particularly good rider, but even at my level riding takes a kind of bodily intelligence, an alert relaxation, which is the complete opposite of the mental intelligence of writing that only engages your body incidentally.

One afternoon we were riding a path that ran high along the side of a valley. I looked down, and saw a heron flying along the rocky stream below us: I love herons but I hadn't known they have a white stripe across the upper side of their wings. Then I looked across to the far side of the valley. It was early spring, as I remember, the air quite warm, and patches of sunlight lay on the old rusts and browns and bronzes, and on the acid greens which were just coming through. From force of habit I started describing mentally what I was seeing, but it was a process of translation: my experience of that moment wasn't verbal at all, and words seemed inadequate to the experience, just as there will always be some things about a poem that no translation can capture. Nor was my experience an hour or so later verbal. We were in a field, relaxedly chatting, when I felt my horse suddenly tense, then gather herself to bolt. Before I could possibly have thought about what was happening I'd dug my bum down into the saddle, shortened the reins, and got her together under my control. Only then did I see what she - with her 360° vision - had seen: two cyclists were pedalling up behind us, and she didn't like the look of them at all. It occurred to me then that riding is an almost completely right-brained activity, because there isn't time to be anything else: it has to be visual not verbal, simultaneous not linear, a-logical not rational, perceptive and responsive not analytical. And after two days of workshopping that was exactly what I needed.

It's probably what I need more often than I get it, so next week will see me in the Peak District, doing a landscape photography course. Photography is less physical than riding but it is very right-brained. At one time I did a lot of it, as The Mathematics of Love testifies, but I've got out of the habit of seeing things, of thinking in images, of using visual intelligence. As writers we train ourselves in words, we work obsessively at technique, sensitivity, vocabulary and sound. If this blog is sporting its first-ever image at the end of next week you'll know why: it'll be because only by asking readers to become seers will I be able to transmit one important part of the writing life: not writing.

The memory of an elephant

Yesterday I went to the Golden Age of Couture exhibition at the V&A. It's a gorgeous tribute to a vanished age, a last post-War gasp of the pre-War world, top-down fashion for a world that was growing out of top-down decisions about everything else. The great and the good designers dressed the wives of the great and the good ruling class, and the rest of the world followed the suit, literally and figuratively. One desirable figure, one prescribed hemline and nothing done by machine if doigts de fée - the fairy fingers of Dior's seamstresses - could do it better. There was footage of the ateliers of London and Paris, relics of an industry of embroidery firms, corsetières, glove-makers, milliners, and bi-weekly mailings of the latest textile samples. The couture houses courted celebrities, which is perhaps one way that world hasn't been lost: it's hard to believe that the wife of the British Naval Attaché in Paris was an important show-case, but easier in the case of Margot Fonteyn. I assume the low lighting, which makes the frocks glow spectacularly in the darkened exhibition rooms, was necessary for conservation, but it was frustrating because you couldn't always actually see the seaming, the cut of five or six panels for the back of a jacket, the tiny hand-stitches that shaped the dress to a particular client, whose name we know, who is a real person, perhaps, even now. I don't know much about the art of fashion - firmly in the I-know-what-I-like camp, me - though I find the cultural history fascinating (if you read Alison Lurie's The Language of Clothes you'll never buy a garment un-selfconsciously again). But I do know a little of the craft and when you see great craftsmanship in action and in completion it's extraordinarily compelling.

I lingered, and the museum began to close. I wanted some postcards, and to come down gently from my small high by poking among the glossy catalogues and exhibition-inspired scarves and children's workbooks. But the shop was shut and I had to leave, still slightly glowing despite my sore feet and aching back. Maybe that's why walking back through Belgravia to my bus hardly felt as if the last fifty years had passed: there was even a very couture and tail-coated wedding emerging from the Brompton Oratory.

There are the seeds of all sorts of writerly things in this: stories of Dior's muse-models or the keeper of the elephants in Avedon's famous photograph (scroll down for it). There's a chain of thought which recalls the discussion on here about needlework as a metaphor for what writers do, and which could be taken further. There's the small yearning it's started in me to get my sewing machine out and buy some patterns. Will any of these things get any further, with me or anyone else who sees this exhibition? I don't know. I didn't even make notes, though I always have a notebook with me. One day maybe something from yesterday will float back up to the surface, and find itself in a story, or a blog-post, or a wardrobe.

Or maybe not. As someone said, the human memory is very bad: in evolutionary, survival-of-the-fittest terms, its sole function is to help us predict and cope with the future, and anything surplus is discarded. I don't know which of yesterday's experiences is significant and what is surplus. Maybe I'll only know when I see where they turn up next. Or, more disconcertingly still, maybe these events only actually become significant, or surplus, as time passes and my memory makes them so.